Peter Hill

Award-winning journalist and former editor of the Daily Express

Regional differences in prescription charges are outrageous

PRESCRIPTION charges will increase to £8.05 next year and to £8.25 the year after. That’s per item, so if you’re chronically sick and need a shipload of tablets every day you’ll have to take out a mortgage.

If there must be charges, we should all have to pay for our prescriptions [GETTY]

Charges have gone up in 34 of the past 35 years. Unless, of course, you live in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland because then you pay nothing.

I have no idea how this works.

Nor do I understand why care for the elderly is free in Scotland, as is university tuition, both mightily expensive in England.

The Scottish Parliament simply decided one day to abolish charges. It could do that partly because of the annual subsidy it gets from taxpayers in England of £1,500 for every man, woman and child. We taxpayers weren’t consulted of course.

The NHS says it has to charge for prescriptions because it’s so pressed for cash, though I think a fiver per item would be more reasonable, but the regional differences are outrageous. Either everyone should pay or no one should pay. As they say in Scotland: Fair play’s bonnie play.

I ALSO don’t see why Labour and Conservatives are falling over themselves to offer even better deals to the Scots if only they will vote against independence. If the Scottish budget doesn’t work out England will even make up the difference.

Imagine asking your bank (in the unlikely event of getting through to anyone) if they wouldn’t mind paying your bills because you’d rashly bought a Lamborghini.

If Alex Salmond is given a blank cheque like that he’ll only go on an orgy of building monuments to himself. There is no call to offer an extra groat to the Scots. They’re far too canny to cut themselves off from their already generous neighbours.

I HAD one thing in common with Tony Benn: we were both dedicated sock darners and had a brief correspondence on the subject. That alone tells me he was a good sort because a man who darns socks is a man you can trust, probably with your life, unlike someone who puts salt and pepper on his dinner before tasting it.

It’s been amusing to read the fulsome tributes to Benn and to union firebrand Bob Crow, both of whom in their different ways would have turned the country into a cross between Russia under Stalin and North Korea under the Kims. Why are we always decorous to the dead?

About the most disparaging obituary I have read suggested the subject had “failed to live up to his early promise”.

Are we hypocrites out of pure politeness or because we know that one day our turn will come so better not chuck stones in case they come back with interest?

I’M sure he means well but I don’t quite see Noel Edmonds, famous for Mr Blobby and Deal Or No Deal, running the BBC. Out of the blue the 65-year-old TV veteran says he heads a mysterious organisation called Project Reith which would like to take the BBC off our hands.

He says disaster is looming for the organisation which needs to “wake up”. I wonder if it might be better instead if Mr Edmonds were to go back to sleep.

The idea of some nameless group of “wealthy investors” clubbing together to buy one of the few national institutions we can be proud of is not even funny.

The BBC is rightly condemned for being too Left-wing, too up itself and top-heavy with overpaid managers but it is still the world’s finest broadcaster by a very long way. It shouldn’t be sold even to a consortium of Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed and Buddha let alone to Noel and his business pals.

THE costs of HS2, the proposed high-speed rail link between North and South, will escalate unless the main political parties give it their full support right now, warns the project’s chairman Sir David Higgins. Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?

I think we can safely assume, based on the entire history of government schemes, that the costs will escalate whether the decision is made tonight or next time Comet Hale-Bopp passes.

Present estimates for this ridiculous white elephant are £50billion, enough to make the latest lottery winner look like a pauper.

I guarantee that if it goes ahead it will a) cost at least double the highest predictions and b) make absolutely zero impact on the prosperity of the North. But it is so grandiose that politicians will be unable to resist it.

Everybody’s been at it since that photo of Barraco Barner with David Cameron and the dishy Danish prime minister at Nelson Mandela’s memorial. It’s the latest madness of the Me Me Me society and sadly some idiots are so upset at the result they’re resorting to plastic surgery.

Don’t the selfish selfie snappers realise that honest portrait photographers will go out of business? Anyway, when you reach a certain age it’s bad enough just catching sight of your reflection in a shop window, never mind making a permanent record. I often wonder as I look in the shaving mirror who the hell it is gazing at me and wish they wouldn’t.